Comment A Positive Review for Vista. (Score 2, Interesting) 692
There's a few positive comments in here somewhere, but you really have to dig for them (as you will no doubt have to for this one).
Have any of you ever tried running Windows 95, lately. I did, and noticed there were alot of little things that I could do in 98/2k that were not possible to do in 95 (like right-click interactivity in the start menu), so much so that I cannot effeciently and effectively use Windows 95 today. The same thing also applied to windows 98 and XP for me.
The very same thing applies also to XP and Vista. There are alot of small refinements in Vista that make it difficult to work the way I want in XP. Things that you wouldn't even notice until a few months of using Vista. In brief, here are a few of the things I find invaluable time savers:
Take for example, file renaming in Explorer. When you hit F2 to rename a file, it no longer highlights the extension (when you have the extension visible) and you can press the TAB button to move to rename the next file, etc.
The start button Search Field. I no longer have to go hunting around my start menu if I don't know where something is. And let's be honest, I have tonnes of crap on my start menu that I only need occasionally and never know where it is. Now, instead of wasting a few seconds (and losing my train of thought) searching for the program I need, can just type (a part of) the program name, and windows will load it.
Default Folder names: Gone is the excessively verbose "Documents and Settings" replaced with "Users" and so too is My Documents no longer the root for all your personal files... now your username is the root folder (I just wish more programs realised that and stopped cluttering up my Documents folder with their useless settings.)
Change Explorer Views: This one's a simple one... The view selection (i.e. detail, list, thumbnail) is now a button/dropdown, instead of just a dropdown. I'd much rather click the button 3 times instead of clicking it once, moving the mouse down to the name of the view I want and selecting it. Anything that can shave seconds off an already fairly easy process is awesome.
I like the new insanely large thumbnail sizes when dealing with a pictures folder.
UAC: I bought Vista for both my parents specifically because of UAC. If you're an administrator, UAC behaves stupidly. Granted. It becomes some weird twisted sort of double "Are you *really* sure?" confirmation. Useless. But, when you're not an administrator, it becomes the most obviously useful thing in the world. In XP, if you are a regular user, and you need to run some process as admin, you need to know beforehand. You need to find (sometimes by holding Shift when you right-click) the RunAs command, and use it to run this program as an Admin. In Vista, you can run it normally, and if it then finds out it needs admin rights, it will prompt you then and there to enter an admin user/password. That's the key difference. Needing to have foreknowledge and not.
When I first installed a beta or RC of Vista, I immediately declared it a complete and utter failure and bomb. I proclaimed I would never use it fully, and most certainly not ever let my parents use it, for fear of all the questions I would be bombarded with.
After I used it for a few months though, once things became familiar to me again, I greatly prefered it to XP. And it's a pain having to continue to use old clunky (interface-wise) XP.
I realise that many of the improvements I mentioned can be applied to XP through some means or other, but the point is that by including that improved functionality in the OS, they have raised the baseline. And I do recognise that to use Vista, you'll need a bigger screen resolution (long gone are the days of 1024×768 being enough), and a faster machine. I just take it for granted that as machines become more powerful and have more resources, so too do the software programs use those resources. Anyway, that's just my personal take on Vista, for me and my family.
Have any of you ever tried running Windows 95, lately. I did, and noticed there were alot of little things that I could do in 98/2k that were not possible to do in 95 (like right-click interactivity in the start menu), so much so that I cannot effeciently and effectively use Windows 95 today. The same thing also applied to windows 98 and XP for me.
The very same thing applies also to XP and Vista. There are alot of small refinements in Vista that make it difficult to work the way I want in XP. Things that you wouldn't even notice until a few months of using Vista. In brief, here are a few of the things I find invaluable time savers:
Take for example, file renaming in Explorer. When you hit F2 to rename a file, it no longer highlights the extension (when you have the extension visible) and you can press the TAB button to move to rename the next file, etc.
The start button Search Field. I no longer have to go hunting around my start menu if I don't know where something is. And let's be honest, I have tonnes of crap on my start menu that I only need occasionally and never know where it is. Now, instead of wasting a few seconds (and losing my train of thought) searching for the program I need, can just type (a part of) the program name, and windows will load it.
Default Folder names: Gone is the excessively verbose "Documents and Settings" replaced with "Users" and so too is My Documents no longer the root for all your personal files... now your username is the root folder (I just wish more programs realised that and stopped cluttering up my Documents folder with their useless settings.)
Change Explorer Views: This one's a simple one... The view selection (i.e. detail, list, thumbnail) is now a button/dropdown, instead of just a dropdown. I'd much rather click the button 3 times instead of clicking it once, moving the mouse down to the name of the view I want and selecting it. Anything that can shave seconds off an already fairly easy process is awesome.
I like the new insanely large thumbnail sizes when dealing with a pictures folder.
UAC: I bought Vista for both my parents specifically because of UAC. If you're an administrator, UAC behaves stupidly. Granted. It becomes some weird twisted sort of double "Are you *really* sure?" confirmation. Useless. But, when you're not an administrator, it becomes the most obviously useful thing in the world. In XP, if you are a regular user, and you need to run some process as admin, you need to know beforehand. You need to find (sometimes by holding Shift when you right-click) the RunAs command, and use it to run this program as an Admin. In Vista, you can run it normally, and if it then finds out it needs admin rights, it will prompt you then and there to enter an admin user/password. That's the key difference. Needing to have foreknowledge and not.
When I first installed a beta or RC of Vista, I immediately declared it a complete and utter failure and bomb. I proclaimed I would never use it fully, and most certainly not ever let my parents use it, for fear of all the questions I would be bombarded with.
After I used it for a few months though, once things became familiar to me again, I greatly prefered it to XP. And it's a pain having to continue to use old clunky (interface-wise) XP.
I realise that many of the improvements I mentioned can be applied to XP through some means or other, but the point is that by including that improved functionality in the OS, they have raised the baseline. And I do recognise that to use Vista, you'll need a bigger screen resolution (long gone are the days of 1024×768 being enough), and a faster machine. I just take it for granted that as machines become more powerful and have more resources, so too do the software programs use those resources. Anyway, that's just my personal take on Vista, for me and my family.
